Obama hits GOP on Bush tax cuts

President Barack Obama used his Saturday radio address to whack the Republican House and GOP rival Mitt Romney for resisting his calls for extending the Bush tax cuts for only the first $250,000 of household income.

Touting the Senate’s narrow passage of the president’s proposal — which he has repeatedly mentioned in campaign speeches since re-introducing the idea July 9 — Obama implored Republicans to support his idea.

Story Continued Below

“Instead of doing what’s right for middle-class families and small business owners, Republicans in Congress are holding these tax cuts hostage until we extend tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans,” Obama said.

“You see, Republicans in Congress and their nominee for president believe that the best way to create prosperity in America is to let it trickle down from the top. They believe that if our country spends trillions more on tax cuts for the wealthy, we’ll somehow create jobs — even if we have to pay for it by gutting things like education and training and by raising middle class taxes.”

Without mentioning either predecessor by name, Obama said higher taxes on the wealthy spurred economic growth during the Clinton era while lowering them led to the recession at the end of the George W. Bush years.

House Republicans have said they will not entertain Obama’s proposal. Romney and House Speaker John Boehner both oppose it.

Those Republicans, Obama said, are wrong in their economic approach.

“And I know they’re wrong because we already tried it that way for most of the last decade,” he said. “It didn’t work. We’re still paying for trillions of dollars in tax cuts that benefited the wealthiest Americans more than anyone else; tax cuts that didn’t lead to the middle-class jobs or higher wages we were promised and that helped take us from record surpluses to record deficits.”

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, delivering the Republican response, protested against a different type of taxes, calling for the repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax while saying Democrats are content to raise taxes on everyone if they don’t get their way.

“As the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, I put forward a common-sense plan to prevent this massive tax increase, so we can undertake a long overdue overhaul of America’s broken Tax Code next year,” Hatch said. “Unfortunately, Washington Democrats’ default position appears to be to let everyone’s taxes skyrocket if Congress doesn’t agree to their plan to raise taxes on one of the most productive segments of our economy.”